Banh Meee opened softly on President’s Day at 399 Capitol Ave. in Hartford, serving Vietnamese pho, noodle dishes, banh mi sandwiches and traditional beverages. The 26-seat restaurant will be in a soft-opening phase for about two weeks, followed by a grand-opening celebration in early March, says...

Journey Home hosted its 3rd annual gala at The Atrium at CityPlace in Hartford Friday evening, Feb. 9. The Home is Where the Heart Is gala is hosted each year to raise awareness for chronic homelessness. The evening featured a live auction emceed by Renee DiNino of iHeart Radio, silent auction...

Must Watch

Arts

Alex Moggridge has become a familiar face in Connecticut regional theater. Now he’s playing one of the most famous characters in all of literature. Moggridge is Sherlock Holmes in “Baskerville,” playwright Ken Ludwig’s comic take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1901 detective story “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”...

Ken Ludwig is ubiquitous. He’s in Hartford. He’s in New Haven. He’s on a train. His game is afoot. Ludwig’s one of the most popular playwrights in the world today. This month, two major Connecticut theaters are loading up with Ludwig works. First up is his lighthearted new adaptation of Agatha...

Editor’s note: In the wake of the high-school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last week, singer/actress Deborah Cox is unable to perform at Tuesday night’s opening performance of “The Bodyguard The Musical” at The Bushnell. Cox will perform as planned for the rest of the show’s Hartford run. Understudy...

Museums

The art of Edward Gorey is full of unidentifiable creatures, gloomy adults and children doing who-knows-what, inexplicable shadows, buildings that very well may be haunted. But he was not alone in his artistic exploration of the macabre. In fact, he surrounded himself with it. In his homes in New...

In November 1662, Sir William Paston knew that he was dying. He was worried that his eldest son, Robert, and his second wife, Margaret, would fight over the family’s collection of artworks and artifacts. So Paston added a sly element to his will: Upon his death, Margaret would decide how the collection...

The Connecticut Science Center in Hartford is all about science, things that can be proved. The “Harry Potter” books and movies are all about fantasy and magic, things that can’t be proved. Still, there are some overlaps. The science center will explore them in a two-day event Feb. 24 and 25 titled...

Movies

Banff Mountain Film Festival, the annual evening of outdoor adventure-related short films, will be presented in four Connecticut locations from Feb. 24 to March 11. The Shubert Theater, 247 College St. in New Haven on Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. Admission ranges from $20 to $36. Garde Arts Center, 325 State...

Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St.in Hartford, will show an environmentalist documentary on Sunday, Feb. 25, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker. “Water Warriors” tells the story of a rural community in New Brunswick, Canada, where citizens fought a Texas energy company whose quest for a natural...

The new exhibit at Yale Center for British Art, “The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World,” focuses on an old English noble family and its mania for collecting objets d’art. A film series at the New Haven museum will complement the exhibit, telling stories from old England. All four films...

Family Fun

Can you tell one type of frog from another by the sound of its call? If so, FrogWatch USA needs you. If not, the group will teach you how. Connecticut chapters of FrogWatch USA, a nationwide initiative to monitor and record the number and variety of frogs and toads around the country, are holding...

Most Americans had never heard the word bionic until the TV show “The Six Million Dollar Man” came on the air in 1974. But bionics was common decades before that, in ways that affected average people: glasses, braces, artificial limbs, hearing aids. Bionics are even more common today: hip and knee...

February break may be shortened for some school systems, but that doesn’t translate into a shortage of things to do while the kids are home: Bristol: Children ages 6 to 12 are invited to create, play and imagine during the President's Day school break in the New England Carousel Museum galleries....

Things To Do

I’ll admit to having no nostalgia for the movie on which “The Bodyguard The Musical” is based. In 1992, I was listening to grunge, punk and Swedish death metal, not Houston’s gospel-throated dance pop. I didn’t see the film until years after it was released and had forgotten most of the plot when...

There are lots of reasons to revisit Arthur Miller’s retelling of the Salem Witch Trials, “The Crucible.” McCarthyism and other political witch-hunts — the metaphorical underpinning of Miller’s play — are a hot topic again. January marked the 65th anniversary of “The Crucible”’s debut. This year...

Rhinold Ponder, an African-American artist, has hated “the n-word” his whole life. So it may seem strange that his recent series of artworks – on exhibit at Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven, with an opening reception Feb. 21 – are filled with repeated usages of that hateful word: painted, collaged,...

Travel

Ooh, la la. It’s hardly a surprise that it’s the French who coined the term, “après-ski” considering they’re among some of the first Europeans to have widely embraced the sport back in the 1900s. “After ski,” as it translates, describes the imbibing, merriment, and social activities that follow...

With the arrival of November comes colder weather and the first flakes of snow, officially kicking off ski season. While for enthusiasts it’s the most wonderful time of the year, it also tends to be the most expensive, because for the most part, a day on the slopes doesn’t come cheap. There are,...

For many travelers, hotels are nothing more than a generic place to sleep and store their luggage while they spend their days exploring exotic locales. In some cases, however, the accommodations steal the show. From doing jail time to sleeping in a treehouse, these unique hotels and inns from New...